David Pines

David Pines (8 June 1924 to 3 May 2018) was an American theoretical physicist who worked on the many-body problems of condensed matter and nuclear physics.^1,2 In a 1950 paper with David Bohm at Princeton he set out the random phase approximation, which reduces the problem of many strongly interacting electrons to an effective single-body problem; a colleague says it has affected almost every field of physics.¹ Working with John Bardeen at the University of Illinois, he showed in 1954 that phonons, the vibrations of a crystal lattice, can make some electrons attract each other. That Bardeen-Pines interaction is the mechanism behind the Cooper pairing of BCS superconductivity.^1,2 He spent most of his career at Urbana-Champaign and was the founding director of its Center for Advanced Study.¹ The University of California's Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter had him as its founding co-director.¹ He argued for describing the properties that arise from the behaviour of a system's components as emergence.¹

As an adviser to Los Alamos he was among the senior scientists George Cowan convened in the early 1980s to plan a new interdisciplinary institute. He recruited Philip Anderson and his close friend Murray Gell-Mann, drew on his contacts for early funding, and co-organised the 1984 founding workshops, published as Emerging Syntheses in Science.¹ He served the Santa Fe Institute as vice president, chair of the board of trustees and co-chair of the science board.¹ With Anderson and Kenneth Arrow he edited The Economy as a Complex Evolving System, from the Santa Fe meetings on complexity economics that became SFI's first funded research programme.¹ At his death he was SFI's co-founder in residence.¹

He appears in the Santa Fe Institute entry's account of the founding.